Darren Wilson In Hiding, Unemployable After Killing Michael Brown

By Jon Swaine, Guardian UK

04 August 15

This is a joint investigation with the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

arren Wilson has attempted to return to work as a police officer since leaving his job in Ferguson, Missouri, amid the furore over his fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old, it emerged on Monday.

Wilson said he applied for several police positions elsewhere but was turned down due to concerns that he was a liability. “It’s too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable,” he told the New Yorker, during interviews for a profile published as the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death approaches.

The 29-year-old said he had resigned from the Ferguson police department days after a grand jury in St Louis declined to prosecute him for killing Brown, in a sharply contested incident that led to months of unrest in the city and protests around the US.

Wilson also told the magazine that despite the controversy, he wished he could return briefly to his old job in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis. “I would want to do it for a day,” he said, in order to show observers that he was not “defeated”.

According to the article, Wilson and his wife, Barbara Spradling, who has also left her job as a Ferguson police officer, are living with their young child at an undisclosed location in the St Louis area. Wilson bought the property but his name was reportedly kept from the documentation out of fears for his safety.

Over the course of several wide-ranging interviews, Wilson reflected on his police career but was not quoted directly about the fatal shooting of Brown on 9 August last year on a residential side street following a struggle at Wilson’s patrol vehicle.

Some witnesses said Brown was shot while posing no threat or even holding his hands in the air in surrender. Wilson and others said the 18-year-old had turned and charged at the officer after initially fleeing – an account that was ultimately accepted by the grand jury and the US Department of Justice, which carried out a parallel criminal investigation.

Wilson said of joining the Ferguson police department initially that he had chosen to remain in a predominantly African American area after being laid off from his former job in nearby Jennings when the force there was disbanded in 2011. “I liked the black community,” said Wilson. “I had fun there ... There’s people who will just crack you up.”

The US Department of Justice did find that Ferguson’s criminal justice system was blighted by institutional racism. Wilson, however, told the magazine he had not read the government’s report on the issue. “I don’t have any desire,” he said. “I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It’s out of my control.”